The Creation Theory of Entrepreneurship and Lean Startup Frameworks: Complementary or Contradictory?

The practitioner framework, the Lean Startup, largely based on the experience of Blank (2013), and developed separately from scholarly work, has none-the-less made inroads in the academic literature. In reconciling The Lean Startup framework with entrepreneurship theory, Blank and Eckhardt argue that theory work in entrepreneurship is fragmented. However, this paper argues that these theories may not be as fragmented as implied. Indeed, many theories in entrepreneurship can be grouped into two “families”—one of which is broadly consistent with the model in The Lean Startup, while the other is deeply inconsistent with this model but consistent with an important theory in entrepreneurship: the Creation Theory of Entrepreneurial Opportunities. What this paper shows is that there are important differences that lead to boundary conditions between these two families of theory. More profound, these different approaches to the entrepreneurship process suggest they should be applied in different entrepreneurial settings and at different points in the process. This paper examines the link between the Creation Theory of Entrepreneurship and its associated family of theories and the Lean Startup framework and its associated family of theories, such as Discovery, IO Nexus, The Scientific Method, and so forth. The paper concludes by describing the different contexts under which each family of theories apply and suggests future research that empirically test the boundary conditions of these different theory families.